Wii - Super Mario Galaxy Review

On the drive to work this morning I complained for 20 minutes about a video game. Yep, that's right. 10 years of college, and it leads to me complaining about video games.
As you probably know, Keren and I got a Wii, a video game system which she has blogged about previously here.

Maybe some other nerd will find my review useful someday. And also, it's Friday night, and I don't feel like working. My review is sloppy, but it makes me feel good to write it.

As a quick review of what's so neat about the Wii, you can look here. In a nutshell, it's video game system that you have to get up off the couch and move to play (well, most of the time).

Now, you may rightly ask "why are you devoting a post to a freaking video game?" Well, fortunately or unfortunately, Super Mario Galaxy took up a signifcant amount of our time in our lives the last couple of months. I'm ashamed to say one Saturday I played for 4 hours. I thought I was more grown-up than that. Keren and I have both played; it's good family time. We regularly coach and encourage each other's Mario (the guy on the right) to jump over lava pits, dodge tornados, kill monsters, and swim with sharks.

Now down to business. I'm evaluating Super Mario Galaxy in light of more modern games (the last 10 years).
Pros:
At the start, the game is seemingly novel. The "worlds" you play are called galaxies. You go to each galaxy and use Mario to solve little puzzles and search the galaxy for stars.Your Mario can move in 3 dimensions (see picture above and this little video), and the game-play is non-linear, meaning you can quit a galaxy at any time if it gets too hard, and go try another. The worlds are colorful, and the 3-d game play is very cool...I'm guessing they have a proprietary video card that allows them to do this.

As you move on in the game, you get to swim underwater, jump over lava, and fight lots of bad guys. In places, the gravity switches and Mario suddenly falls for no reason. You get to try various means of transportation, including a spring, a ball, and a bubble, a manta ray (see right), and about 3 or 4 other things.

Cons:
This is long.
The game is fun, but in my opinion, the it's basically a slightly fancier version of Super Mario for Nintendo 64, which also had many of these features.
It also tells you ahead of time how many stars are in each galaxy, and make the galaxy small so there's no need to explore -- some of the best video games don't tell you what you're going to find, if anything, when you explore a new world in the game.

Also, the fancy 3-d gameplay seems to come at the cost of making the galaxies more explorable. Sometimes in a video game, you don't want to complete a mission, or find something; you just want to walk around, explore, and find secret stuff. This is not an option in Super Mario Galaxy. In an apparent attempt to compenstate for this shortcoming, the game contains missions in which you have to finish a galaxy in a set amount of time, compete in a race, or complete the galaxy with no damage points. We found this quite frustrating.

Finally, the developers took away the 3-d camera control afforded by Nintendo 64 Super Mario. Only occassionally are you allowed to switch 3-d camera angles to aid in completing some task in the game. The omission of this unrestricted feature in Super Mario Galaxy is baffling.

Overall:
I don't think this is a great game. It's an extension of Super Mario for Nintendo 64, which I enjoyed. There are so many ways you could imagine working in the unique Wii controllers, but it seems the developers ignored this. The repetitiveness of the worlds (races, timed completions, etc.) is disappointing. The dead giveaway of many of the games secrets and limited opportunities for exploration, and the frustration the camera angle limitations caused Keren make this game a 7 out of 10 -- I generally don't spend more than 5 minutes playing something less than a 7, so it's still a decent game.

I plan to follow this up with a discussion of my favorite video games of all time.